


and grace, too

by mriaow



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Kid Fic, Minor Character Death, Past Child Death, Post-Canon, Self-Hatred, Single Dad Jaime Lannister
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-07-22
Packaged: 2020-07-11 14:50:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19929868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mriaow/pseuds/mriaow
Summary: "Robb," he lies swiftly to introduce himself."And who's that then?" She jerks her head at the baby, still burbling milk down his front."I - he was born this morning, I haven't named him yet."She snorts as they start walking again. "Had nine months and couldn't think of anything?""She - I didn't get to name the others," he says. His hand slides up to cup the boy's head, soft and impossibly small in his palm.





	and grace, too

**Author's Note:**

  * For [daisysusan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/daisysusan/gifts).



> If the show can ignore/handwave pregnancy timelines, then SO CAN I, DAMMIT. This starts in 8x04 and continues through to post-canon, keeping some bits, remixing some and wholesale throwing out the rest.
> 
> The character death is Cersei, btw; the past deaths of their children are also discussed. Jaime is non-seriously injured multiple times due to who he is as a person.

All the armies of the living ride away from Winterfell three days after they defeat death itself, and Jaime watches them go.

He stays in Winterfell, where he’s not quite as useful with repairs as he was hoping he’d be. There’s a limit to how much masonry and carpentry he can do one-handed, and plenty of people more familiar with the castle are already overseeing. 

Sansa’s already set someone to take an inventory of the living and the refugees, and he’s surprised when she accepts his offer to coordinate supplies and allotments for them.

“I’ve heard many things about you, Jaime Lannister, most of them neither good or true, but one of them was that you were less idiotic an army leader than some others.” She says it sardonically, but he takes it as a compliment. 

The time passes quickly - the days are cold and full of work to do, and at night he falls asleep next to Brienne, somehow never quite tired enough to not dream of the dead.

He feels both still asleep and as though he’s finally awoken, somehow unable to believe they’re finally kissing even while they’re pressed against each other. She's shy and bold in turns - they both are. She turns bright red when he talks to her during, confessing to her how he’d thought about this, telling her what he's doing. She’s just as free of niceties and coquettishness and pretense here as anywhere, as though she’s unable to be anything but herself at all times. When they’re together he feels made for a purpose, a good one.

She likes his long fingers, likes flipping him over with her legs, loves the feeling of his beard on her skin. She marks up beautifully, pressing her fingers against the reddened skin on her neck and hip and inner thigh when she thinks he's not looking.

He catches her doing it one morning and they stay abed late despite her protests, Jaime unable to resist the wordless pleading crane of her throat as he kisses it, rasping his beard roughly and then brushing his lips over all the tenderest parts of her.

They get some looks for having missed breakfast and Jaime just smirks back, despite having been reliably informed that smugness isn’t as attractive as he thinks it is. Brienne won't make eye contact with anyone and he reaches under the table to squeeze her thigh. He means it as a reassurance more than a tease, but she drops her fork in a clatter and he swallows hard, pulling his hand away.

That night they stay late in the hall after supper, a group of Winterfell residents goading the Tarly boy into telling them the dirtiest things he read in the Citadel scrolls and falling apart laughing. Jamie chokes on his wine and even Sansa smiles at Sam’s stuttering description of the ancient Maesters’ terrible attempts at poetry.

Brienne’s still trying to stifle her laughter when they rise from the table, only a few people left in the hall. There’s no one to see them but Jaime’s chin lifts leaving the hall shoulder to shoulder beside his lady knight, no need to hide where they’re going or that they’re going together.

They haven't yet totally eliminated the awkward pause that follows the closing of their door every evening; they haven’t spoken of it but he thinks they’re both still unsure they can have what they want. But tonight they come together as soon as they're in the chamber. They fall down kissing, her hands holding him right where she wants him as he plunders her mouth, her own still just as hungry as she was the first night. He can’t keep his arms still, sliding over her sides and feeling her muscles, feeling all of her, every tall strong foot pressed against him as they roll and move together, building and falling and building again.

She turns on her side and he slides into her from behind, left hand curling around her thigh to stroke where they join and his mouth moving to the tops of her shoulders, biting at the claw mark scars and the sensitive pale skin. She pushes back against him, off-rhythm but asking wordlessly, wanting, and he wants too, wants her badly, wants her every minute, wants her every way there is to have her, wants to give her everything, wants to know her, wants to - he doesn’t realize he’s talking until she gasps his name, hand shooting down to grab his wrist and head snapping back so hard she knocks him in the nose.

She tries to turn around, apologizing, as his hand comes up to hold his nose and it’s fine, it hurts but he smells her wet on his fingers and growls at her, snapping his hips and she turns back, bracing her arms on the lip of the bed and making low shocked, wounded noises that he chases all the way.

She examines his nose carefully afterward even though he says it’s fine. “Fine enough to root around like a dirty old Maester,” he says, quoting one of Tarly’s tamer stories and squeezing her bum, and she gives a big unattractive snort and falls against him laughing.

His stomach clenches up in happiness and then guilt. It occurs to him that he’s never been so happy in his life as he is right now, all those times he thought he was content in his golden clothes just stealing and drinking and hoarding small secret moments to convince himself it was the life he wanted.

“We get to live, now,” Sansa had told them all at the feast after they fought the dead and Brienne echoed the words in a voice that somehow didn’t shake whenever Jaime shook himself awake in a cold slimy sweat. He doesn’t know how she can be so sure.

They get to live. He should be thankful they survived the long night, should want to grasp that good fortune and not let go but he can’t stop living like a thief, a soul he doesn’t deserve beside him in a bed heaped with furs, warm at last all the way up here in the north. 

-

He gets the news about King’s Landing from Sansa - the dragon, Cersei pledging to marry Euron, a turning of the war - and it stops him dead. He’s felt so apart from the struggle for the throne ever since the army left and it all comes rushing back, his choice to leave choking every breath. He left intending to die keeping the winter from coming for Cersei: to help them, to save them all if he possibly could. And because even he, with dirt for honour and a fool's love-poisoned brain, knew he could no longer stand beside her. That he couldn’t help her anymore, if indeed he’d ever even been able to.

He got on his horse and rode, ran into the dark away from his life’s sun and now he doesn’t know how to live in that choice. He’s let the rhythm of his days, of necessary work and Brienne and cold bracing air, help him forget.

But there’s so much to forget. A cruel old man on his sword, still babbling. Standing guard outside the door listening to Robert fuck his whores. Cersei presenting each of their children at court while he stood silent with the rest of the Kingsguard, face impassive. Myrcella, dying in his arms. Cersei shorn and tortured and he powerless to shield her. A shove out a window he made so easily. Cersei, lighting a fire under the people he’d tried to save. Joffrey, cruelty and blood and wine leaking out his blue lips. Cersei, undoing the great choice of his life. Tommen, falling. The smell of Myrcella’s hair. All of them his triumphs and his failures.

He sits with the news for a fortnight, his mind playing out every possible scenario and his stomach churning. The Stark girls have every reason to be bitterly disappointed that Cersei might have a chance after all. Cersei’s going to keep burning every enemy, real and imagined, and nobody is going to stop her. Cersei a thousand miles away, his sister, alone and vulnerable and impenetrable and evil and alone.

Not alone - with child. Their child, doomed to dragonfire or the Iron Throne, yoked to the wheel like all the rest of them. He does the math, knows she’s likely six months along now, probably more than. If she wasn’t lying to him.

He hates that he can’t discount that she might have been lying to him. 

He knows Brienne can hear him thinking, can feel him tossing next to her, knows that she knows he’s been slipping away. “Don’t go,” she says into the silence one night, finally breaking. 

The worst part of hearing it is that he knows she’s asking for his behalf and not for hers.

“I know you think you can help them, Jaime, but I - I don’t think you can.”

“I don’t think I can either,” he admits, staring at the beams of the ceiling.

“But you think you must,” she finishes for him, because she knows, because everyone knows what a weak, impotent fool Jaime Lannister will be until the very end.

“Yes,” he says, refusing to look at her. If he has to break both their hearts he’ll do it. He’s ended lives, he’s ended reigns, he can end a few more dreams. He’s broken so many things. He thought it would be easier by now.

“I’ll come with you,” she says, of course she does, her sturdy bloodhound sense of justice to be done, her good godsdamned heart.

“No,” he says immediately, sharper than he means to. She doesn’t belong in their mess. He can’t ask her to march next to him back to Cersei. Gods, what a thing to ask. And if there came a situation where he had to choose who to stand beside, where she had to sacrifice for him, for the child - no. He’ll break his promise to Brienne in service of the first one he ever made and the only one he hasn’t truly broken yet, but he won’t do it in front of her. He doesn’t delude himself into thinking he can command Brienne of Tarth to do anything, but he can’t let that happen. 

“Don’t be a fool,” she snaps back.

“Too late for that,” he says, rueful. He finally turns to look at her, blue eyes clear and anguished. He feels the pain like a physical thing. 

“I know you would, but you can’t. It’s… I swear I’m not being a martyr for the sake of it.”

Her voice is thick with hurt and bitterness. “You’ll jump into every pit you can but you’ve never accepted help once in your life, you and your bloody pride.” She swallows. “Stay.” 

He closes his eyes. “In another life, maybe. I just - I have to know that you’re… I can’t do it if you’re there.”

He hasn’t even decided what he’s talking about yet - if he’s going to King’s Landing to kill Cersei, to die with her, to stand between her and the world, to steal the child, to join the dragon army, to command his own army, to save the capital, to stand outside and beat himself bloody against the city walls.

They keep arguing but he rides away the next night, doesn’t say goodbye, wears Northern armour to pose as a straggler trying to catch up to Jon Snow’s army, makes good time and is a week into the journey before he finds a bundle he didn’t pack at the bottom of his saddlebag.

An extra leather water skin. A length of white clouting. A swaddling cloth, clean and soft and blue.

-

He keeps doing the math the whole ride down, wondering if Euron’s bothered to do so yet, quite sure Tyrion has, nothing to think about except the road ahead of him and the broken trail behind. He can’t push the timing the way he wants to, no longer has the gold or authority to switch horses at will.

The disguise works better this time than it did before: his sword covered, his hair lank, half of the golden hand stowed in his bag, shorn by the Winterfell smithy into smaller chunks for easier pawning and then swapped for coinage at the Crossroads Inn. The other half he left on Brienne’s pillow, fingers curled where he wanted so badly to stay, to be melted down or pawned or fund the restoration of the North or - well, he supposes that’s up to her. 

-

He’s no closer to a plan by the time he gets close to Stokeworth. He has fits and starts of plans, none of them good ones, all designed to fit different goals. Some part of him knows why he’s come but he won’t poke at it, afraid of what he’ll find he has to do. He knows it’s foolish, knows it’s cowardice, can hear Brienne telling him she knows who he is but every time he tries to think of a plan to get in and out of the Red Keep he sees Tommen leaving it the only way he can think of.

He’s gleaned some gossip on the way down, mostly tavern discussion and a quick talk with a septon near the Green Fork who was part of Tywin’s network. Cersei murdering a translator, some sort of power struggle within Daenerys’ army, a delay in fighting to sow discord and lies within the city ahead of an invasion. That last clearly the work of Tyrion and Varys - it must be, since he can’t say Daenerys has showed any inclination towards doing the work of building loyalty or favour beyond expecting it as her due.

Cersei must be seven and a half months along now, closer to eight. Maybe even eight. He thinks. He thinks of nothing else.

He remembers her this far along with Joffrey, the one chance he got to feel his son kick when she left a banquet early while Robert stayed and got drunk. How she felt in his arms. The strong heel moving under his palm through Cersei’s belly, tugging his heart after it. Her protective hand over him at all times, even before he was born. The brief moment his hand had covered hers, back when he had the hand to do it, back when he thought he could protect much of anything.

He tries to make a plan and has to spend some time considering which army he’d rather be caught by, since it seems more or less inevitable the closer he gets. The answer is clearly his own, but he’s surprised at how strongly his instincts reject it. Maybe it’s how badly he wants to talk to Tyrion, how much better his plan could be with his brother’s mind applied to it. Maybe he doubts he’s capable of the deception required to play the part of loyal commander to his own. At least a little of it is wondering if Bronn was the only assassin she’d paid.

In the end, the choice is made for him. He rides on to King’s Landing and is within sight of the Northern army when the dragon blows a hole through the wall and all of a sudden nobody much cares who’s on whose side.

It’s a sacking, not an invasion. Another one. The daughter of the king he killed to prevent this day wheels overhead.

He swaps his own horse for the first free Lannister one he sees, slinging his sword and saddlebag across his body, following the tide of the Unsullied through the city. He knows it better than they do and the chaos parts his way. He’s never made it through this quickly, not stopping, not drawing his sword, passing the rush of people streaming the other way. He’s done the calculations: he’s too late to stop anything and too early to snatch the child. Too early, too late, too foolish, too clumsy. He moves as though in a dream, knowing he can’t beat the dragon to the Red Keep but trying anyway, hoping he isn’t passing a pyromancer heading the other way.

The lion armour on the horse gets him all the way in, the city watch and Queensguard fallen completely to pieces. She’ll be with Qyburn and The Mountain. Maybe with Euron. She’ll be watching. Scheming. He still doesn’t have a plan, but she might. He’s too late. He’s much too late. “You took too long,” she said to him once, and indeed he did.

He has to kill two people on his way to the top of the keep, the floor shuddering around him. He catches the first by surprise, which is good because he still doesn’t have the talent in his left arm for a prolonged swordfight with any of the Queensguard.

He loses that advantage against the second, a guard he vaguely recognizes who refuses to step aside. Jaime has the superior footwork and the advantage of desperation, but an upward slash and a well-timed kick send his sword skittering from his hand. He launches himself at the guard before he can slash again, getting so close the man can’t use his own sword. They grapple, falling to the floor and rolling, Jaime trying to steer them towards his fallen blade. He wishes he was wearing his golden hand or a hook instead of nothing at all, but manages to grab the guard’s dagger and misdirect it, rolling them again and shoving it into his ribs.

He looks up just in time to see Widow’s Wail slide out the gap in the wall blown by the dragon, pushed over the edge by his shoving of the guard. It’s gone, down into the rubble a hundred feet below. He can’t see where the guard’s sword landed and doesn’t have time to look. He adds the fallen man’s dagger to his own and keeps moving up.

The bells begin to ring, the sound putting his heart into his throat. He bursts into the room at the top of the keep only to see The Mountain leaving it from the other side, pursuing someone down the far staircase. There’s no one else here, no one standing watch.

He pauses. And then he hears it - a scream, nearly a bellow, a floor below.

Jaime doubles back the way he’d come, following the noise into a bedchamber. Only Cersei and Qyburn are within, the room shaking with the sounds of labour and dragonfire. There’s blood on the bed. 

“Jaime,” she gasps, shocked, between one contraction and another, face grey and sweaty and filled with relief. 

“I’m here,” he says, stupidly. The only thing he can possibly say. The inadequate truth.

Qyburn pays him no mind, lets him shoulder past and take Cersei’s hand as she screams again. He looks out the window, the dragon swooping over the city, fire and death and a whole country burning. It doesn’t even matter if she sent a pyromancer with the Dragon Queen fulfilling her father’s dying words.

“The child is early,” Qyburn mutters as he works, a thread of danger in his hateful voice.

Her nails break the skin on his hand and her screams join the ones floating up through the window. His city, burning down around them. 

Qyburn says they’ve been at it for a while already - the invasion brought it on early. Too early. Too late. Cersei’s talking to him, telling him there’s something wrong, asking him what’s happening, telling him to go man the scorpions but he doesn’t hear the words. He’s too late and too early and so is the baby but it doesn’t seem to matter, time just one breath and then the next. Time is one toll of the bell. Time is one more scream rippling up her body. 

Qyburn is poised but when the moment comes he lets Jamie move him aside again, and he catches their child in his arms.

He’s so small. 

They cut the cord and wipe his eyes and nostrils and Jaime holds him, holds his son, his head cupped in his hand and his feet just barely reaching Jaime’s elbow. He’s so small, smaller than any of the others had been.

Everything happens at once. 

Cersei cries out his name, struggling to sit upright, her arms extended. The door crashes open, Qyburn turning and taking a blade to the chest. The dragon swoops past the window, closer than on any previous pass, and he can feel a nearby tower begin to crumble. Jaime can barely see, but he can hear - the crash of buildings collapsing, the screams of people below, the clang of armour, the wet gasps from Cersei, the squalling of his son, his son, his son in his arms, and above everything, the bells. Calling for peace, for mercy, for help - calling for everything he wants and nothing he’s ever been able to give. 

Arya Stark stands in front of him, covered in blood and dust, the thin blade of her sword wet with Qyburn’s blood. “What are you doing here?” they ask at the same time.

“I’m here to kill Cersei,” she says, and Cersei hisses behind him, spitting his name.

“I’m here to -” he can’t finish. He knows, finally, exactly what he’s here for, what Brienne apparently knew he was coming for all along: the boy crying in his arms, screaming his first confusion into the world his parents are even now bringing down around his tiny new strawberry ears.

“Jaime,” Cersei says, her voice commanding through pain and fury. “Give him to me and kill her.”

“What’s it going to be, Kingslayer?” Arya seems matter of fact, impossibly calm at the end of all things, although her eyes dart ceaselessly from the window behind him to Cersei on the bed.

He swallows a mouthful of dust, his son’s tiny fists hitting his chest while his sister dies on the bed beside him. He can’t help her. He can’t leave her. It's been the two of them against the world since their first breath. He can’t leave her to be killed, to die alone in this horrible place.

But his son is a warm small weight on his chest, crying out his arrival, his fury at existence. His son wants to breathe, to drink deep. There’s only death here, and Jaime - he rode towards death all month but oh, standing here choking on it he finds he wants life. _Me too, my son._ He chose to come here thinking he would die, the same fate he thought the North had for him but now he chooses life.

“There’s a boat, if you want it,” Arya says, with indifference that surely must be feigned. “Down past the Ser Duncan tapestry by the second kitchen stair. It’s technically for me but I doubt I’ll get there in time. Not sure you can row with your one working hand full, but it’s yours if you want it.”

He doesn’t have time, he has to go if he's going, but he turns and looks at Cersei, the disbelief and dread and fury flashing across the face he knows best. “I have to save him,” he says, the inadequate truth once again. "You know I have to save him."

She lets out a howl of rage, somehow still so beautiful. “Come with me,” he says to Arya, this small dirty assassin with her still-dripping blade. He can’t leave her in a room with Cersei - he can’t. He knows Cersei doesn't deserve mercy, just as he doesn’t deserve escape. He knows she's wielded enough weapons against the defenceless to have earned this unequal end, but he also knows to leave her is to kill her and even at the end he can't do it, he surely can’t.

“I have another way out," Arya says. “Go!” 

He sees Cersei's lips moving, forming his name, his whole body rooted to the spot. The tower shakes with the scream of the dragon. 

Then he feels his son sob against his chest, a tiny wet hiccup, and the small movement turns him and he leaves the room.

Oh, the things he does for love.

-

He breaks into a run as soon as he’s off the stairs, left hand securing his son’s head and neck, stump holding the bundle against his chest as he runs across the hall. He’s never held anything this small and new. Tyrion was bigger as a babe. He hears the roar of dragonfire and the thunder of tumbling buildings, the pleading bells. The bricks come down faster and one falls right in front of him, skimming his hair. The next hits him square in the face, smashing his nose and he can hear the crunch even over the din. He curls over, frantically checking but his head took the whole brunt of the brick and his son's head is bare and tender and unharmed. He knows immediately his nose is broken, a bright pain and a warm rush of blood down his chin, into his mouth. 

He starts running again. He throws himself down the stairs behind the tapestry, moving as carefully as he can make himself, climbing down through the dark. 

He can’t fall. His arms are full. He can't fall.

The boat is right where Arya said it would be. He listens for her footsteps on the stairs but hears nothing. Jaime works quickly, wrapping the baby tightly and making as soft and secure a nest as he can out of his saddlebag on the floor of the boat. He rips a strip off his shirt and fashions a white flag for the prow. A fool’s plea when he can still hear the bells begging for mercy as the keep falls and mothers die, but the bay is an active battleground so he makes the flag anyway. 

He wants to live. 

He takes a run and shoves the boat off the shore, and then rips another strip off his flapping shirt and lashes the stump of his arm to the right oar.

And he rows. Out across Blackwater Bay, his son at his feet, the burning masts of the Iron Fleet falling into the water around him, the hiss of fire hitting the sea. He rows.

-

He has to stop and re-tie his right arm to the oar four times, the movement of rowing shaking it loose and the knots difficult to make tight enough with one hand. The baby stops crying and falls silent. He's two thirds of the way across the bay and he can't do anything but keep rowing, every muscle in his body pounding with effort. He started crying at some point, dripping tears and blood from his nose to join the salt water on the floor of the boat he sprays with every clumsy stroke of the oars. He moves the baby closer to him, protects him from the falling water with the shield of his legs. His stump is bloody where the knot rubs, the skin raw and broken open anew and his sleeve soaked with it, looking for all the world as though he lost his hand this morning. He keeps rowing.

He was aiming for the woods across the bay but knows he won't make it - he cuts the angle of his corner, and then cuts it again, veering towards shore to come aground at the first section of land he's able to. 

The adrenaline that's powered him through, that's kept his arms moving, is ebbing away. He tries to focus his mind. He needs - food, for the child. That's the first thing he needs. That, and distance between him and the city he couldn't save. First one thing, and then the next.

The blue swaddling cloth in his saddlebag is also a sling, oh Brienne you clever girl, and he manages to strap his son across his body, his hands slipping from exhaustion. The baby's skin feels cool and Jaime's heart seizes in fear, fumbling with his shirt and the sling until he lies against Jaime's bare chest. He holds him there as he scrambles up the bank, feeling his blood pump, praying his son can steal the warmth from his skin.

He makes for the Kingswood. The smallfolk from villages south of the city are beginning to stream out of them towards the cover of the woods. If the dragon follows them they'll all die in the forest but Jaime doesn't have a horse or a better plan, so he moves with them. He approaches a woman leading goats, asking her for milk. She shakes her head, not stopping for a moment, intent on fleeing.

"Please," he says, biting back the instinct to command, to force her at daggerpoint. "My son was just born this morning and he hasn't eaten yet. I can pay you, please, I just need milk."

There's a pack of people around him now, all walk-running, dragging goats and chickens and screaming children, everyone sooty and petrified and focused solely on moving. She won't even make eye contact with him and he's thirty seconds from stealing a goat when a stout woman behind her holding the lead of an ox steps up beside them. "If we reach the woods I'll give you some there."

"Please," he says again, the litany halfway out his lips before registering what she's said. 

"At the woods," she says, nodding to the dark line of trees two miles ahead. She's out of breath, all of them walking quickly, breaking into half-runs to put the Mad Queen’s flames behind them.

The woman is dragging her ox as fast as it will go, and Jaime holds out the crook of his right arm. "Here," he says, "Give me the pack," and she loops the rope of her sack of belongings over his elbow and they walk towards the forest.

Jaime spares a glance down at the small head against his breastbone. He nearly trips on a rock but not before he verifies - yes, he's breathing.

-

By the time they reach the woods the baby is crying again, not the lusty anger of his first breaths but thin and reedy, desperate, barely drawing in breath between one cry and the next. He looks over at the woman with the cow, who renews her pace before he can ask. His heart feels tight, his head dizzy with fear. Jaime can feed himself in the woods. He can go without food, without water. He can protect his child from predators with a blade. But he doesn't know what babies need, and he can't get milk from a stream or a snare.

He’s more helpless now than he ever was while chained to a spike in the ground.

As soon as they enter the brush at the end of the Kingswood he fumbles the leather water skin out of his bag. The woman stops in the shade, kneeling beside her ox and beckoning for the skin. She passes it up and he can smell the milk, feel its warmth.

"Here, you need just a pinprick in the end, or let him suck it off your finger," she instructs him.

His hand full, he gestures at his dagger and she warily takes it, deftly making the smallest hole in the end and immediately twisting it up to save the milk from draining. "When he's done you need to pinch the end to save the milk," she explains.

He shifts the boy to the right side of his chest so he can use his hand, and together they place the tip of the bag in his open, cawing mouth.

The baby doesn't close his lips around it, the thinnest line of milk dribbling down the side of his chin, and Jamie curses, chest seized in fear. The woman grabs his little finger and pops it in the child's mouth, which immediately seals around it with surprising strength.

She lays the tip of the skin atop his finger and together they get it into the baby’s mouth alongside the fingertip he’s clamped down on. They have to try twice more and then - Jaime’s whole body shudders as he feels the child begin to suck.

Deep, mad gulps, pulling on Jaime's finger and getting milk from the small hole in the skin. His mouth is so small, the tiniest flowerbud come to life, bending hungrily towards the sun. Jaime doesn't realize he's crying again until he sees a tear splash on his son's cheek.

"Thank you," he whispers, to the woman holding the end of the skin aloft to let the milk flow through and to the baby in his arms, so hungry to live.

"Walk with me," the woman says, casting a pitying eye over the picture he’s sure he presents: newly one-handed, face broken open, with an early babe and a dead wife. "Not sure how much she can graze in here but she still has milk for now." 

"I have gold,” he says, choking on the pity and realizing too late he should keep his mouth shut and play the part. He gives his voice a Stormlands lilt. “To pay you for the milk."

She frowns, looking around at the people still streaming around them into the Kingswood. "Stop saying that or you'll have to use that knife. Save it for a wet nurse if we make it as far as a village."

The baby spits out Jaime's finger, milk dribbling out of his mouth. The woman - "Jona," she says - shows him how to twist up the end of the skin to keep the milk from escaping through the tiny hole, and he slices a thin strip of leather from his belt to fasten the twist closed.

"Robb," he lies swiftly to introduce himself.

"And who's that then?" She jerks her head at the baby, still burbling milk down his front.

"I - he was born this morning, I haven't named him yet."

She snorts as they start walking again. "Had nine months and couldn't think of anything?"

"She - I didn't get to name the others," he says. His hand slides up to cup the boy's head, soft and impossibly small in his palm. He needs just one hand to hold a whole little life. 

-

He walks with Jona and her cow, joined in the early evening by two villagers she recognizes, an old man with no teeth and his niece. The niece spends the whole time moaning that she hadn't grabbed her own animals. "I didn't think we had time," she says glumly, watching the ox trudge after them. “I wish I’d brought them.”

“We all have things we wish we could have brought, lass,” says Jona gruffly, and the niece shoots Jaime a guilty look.

All four of them, including the cow, are skeptical of Jaime, and he can't even hunt properly in the woods to prove himself with a screaming babe lashed to his chest and the peace of the forest disturbed by the ash in the sky and hundreds of people tramping through.

And he screams - now that he has food in his belly, the baby's cries get more confident, proclaiming his profound dissatisfaction with his current lot. “You and me both, lad,” Jaime says wearily. They pause briefly every hour or so to feed him again. At one point, he hears the unholy scream of dragon in the distance, crowing its rage and victory.

When they finally stop it’s been dark for some time, just shafts of moonlight shooting down through the trees and catching the ash like the stars on the snow at Winterfell, crisp and peaceful and deadly.

“I’ll take first watch,” Jaime says as they sit next to a stream. The fleeing villagers have spread out into the Kingswood but he can still see a few other groups further downstream, clumps of exhausted people hoping it’s safe to stop running for now.

He passes his flint to the old man. “Only a small fire, just so we can sort ourselves,” he instructs, and then lays out the contents of his saddlebag to take inventory, everything but the golden chunks of his right hand.

Jona grabs the length of cloth someone at Winterfell - he now suspects that Samwell Tarly’s wife might have also had a hand in it, not sure what Brienne knows about the needs of babies - stuffed in his bag and gestures for his dagger. “To make some clouts to keep the babe clean,” she says, and Jaime finds himself suddenly, pathetically grateful to be at the mercy of strangers. It’s been in short supply, in his experience, but then again it’s very possible he’s been looking in all the wrong places.

 _You see, Brienne,_ he thinks, with an ironic amount of wry pride. _I can accept help._

He wets his shirt in the cold water of the stream, holding the damp fabric under his arm until it’s as warm as he can make it from his body and then wipes his son clean, gently wiping the ash and afterbirth and salt water and dirt and grief from his tiny pink body. His small arms wave in the cool night air, tiny fist shaking. Jaime counts his fingers and his toes, which curl around his thumb, grip strong and instinctual. They feed him again, Jaime’s eyes pricking at the determination in his industrious gulps. Jona shows him how to wrap the fresh clout and tuck the swaddling cloth tight, and he washes the dirtied clout in the stream. 

He lies back against a bed of moss and tucks the baby in the crook of his arm - his son, his _son_. He’s stopped screaming for the moment, just making small gurgling noises as a prelude to sleep. It’s dark and he can’t see him, but he can smell the scent of him, sweet and milky. He takes a deep, shaky inhale before breathing out warm air over the thin skin of his son’s tender head.

Now that he’s thought of Brienne in passing he can’t stop - he wants her here on the other side of his child, keeping them warm, keeping them safe. He wants her and Oathkeeper to lead him through the forest. He wants the shelter of her strong body and he wants her solidity, her conviction. He wants - as unfair a thought as he knows it is, given whose body he stole the boy from - to show him to her, to introduce her. 

_This is my son,_ he wants to say to someone who understands, who knows how much this means. _Isn’t he beautiful._

-

The next day he packs up, planning to keep moving east, but the others make no move to get ready. “Wait a day or so in the forest,” the niece says when he cocks his head at her. “And then we’ll head back out.”

“But it’s - it’s all burned. Everything’s gone.”

“Maybe so, maybe not. Have to see for ourselves, see if anything can be saved,” she says.

They have family here, homes and lives. No matter if Daenerys has burnt them all, which it seems very likely she has. They can go back. Daenerys doesn’t give a shit about them, nor would anyone else on the throne. These people aren't traitors, haven't broken another oath in a line of them, aren't carrying the biggest threat to the throne in a blue sling across their chest. 

His blood freezes. 

They can go back - and when they do they'll likely tell of the blond one-handed man with the fresh babe. 

He told Brienne on their first trip south that she had to kill the innocent farmer who recognized him but now he holds the knife and responsibility she carried, with a bigger price than his own life at stake if he gets it wrong. At the time he prescribed Brienne the sentence with confidence, knowing it had to be done, but now he has to carry it out and gods _damn_ it, he doesn’t want to kill anyone. He’s so tired of murdering people on someone else’s behalf.

Maybe he doesn’t have to - they all think his hand was only recently chopped off, and the broken nose and bloody scrape obscure his face. His long hair is no longer shining by even the most generous of observations, and he doesn’t carry a sword or wear a golden hand. It’s unlikely they will ever make the connection between Robb the poor maimed father and Jaime Lannister with the newborn heir to the Iron Throne.

Unlikely. But not, of course, impossible.

He can't bring himself to do it. But then he couldn't bring himself to leave Brienne and he had; he couldn't leave Cersei to die until he did; he couldn't kill the king, cuckold the king, hurt a child, fail his family until, of course, he did.

He should kill them, and he hates, he hates that he can hear her stubborn voice saying _you couldn't swing a sword left-handed until you could, couldn't keep a promise until you could, couldn’t trust a stranger with your life, couldn’t kill the dead, couldn't ride into the mouth of a dragon until, of course, you did_. 

Fuck.

"I can't go back,” he says, voice cracking. “Thank you for your milk and your kindness. I think I still have family in a village past Bronzegate. I'll make for south of the Kingswood.”

He offers to buy the ox from Jona and is surprised when the old man makes a disapproving noise at her, gesturing at the baby and then making hand signals at his niece. She doesn’t need to translate, because Jona speaks up. “Leave off, I wasn’t going to,” she says to the old man. 

She addresses Jaime: “No need - we’ll find the Kingsroad and I’ll come with you to the first village. If there’s no wet nurse or goat for you there we can talk prices then.”

She gives him a frank once-over and although his instinct is to mistrust the suggestion, he understands that her concern is less for him and more for his very evident lack of knowledge regarding the care of infants.

It’s a generous offer - suspiciously selfless, and for all he knows, Jona is accompanying him in order to report him to the first soldier she sees and claim her reward. He shouldn’t let her. He shouldn’t trust her. He shouldn’t trust anyone, not even one day out from killing one queen and depriving blood from another. 

He wants to protect his son; will do so at all costs. And Westeros is a hard, cruel, unfair world. But he doesn’t want to raise a son who will turn his blade on people who help him. Doesn’t want to carry the boy into a future bought with the blood of innocents. And he knows better than most that to kill for a secret is no protection at all. So for now he nods, stands, hopes to all the gods he isn’t wrong and follows her into the cool dark green.

-

It takes them until the afternoon to find the Kingsroad. They both take a few mouthfuls of the ox’s milk themselves to stave off the hunger but it’s still slow going, Jona’s strides shorter than his and frequent stops needed for feeding and changing the baby and letting the cow graze.

They walk mostly in silence, save for the pauses, when Jaime takes the opportunity to ask questions about caring for babies. Jona seems quite knowledgeable, but then it doesn’t take much to know more than he does.

“My son is grown, he’s on a farm up in the Crownlands. Raised two girls as well, their family gone and all. ”

“Ah,” he says. “So we’re just the latest in a line of wayward children taken under your wing.”

She looks him up and down. “Hardly. You’d hurt coming out, big man like you.”

“It’s been my impression that they all hurt coming out,” he says, his right arm folded across the little milk-heavy five-pound weight of his son.

“Yes, you mentioned others,” she says neutrally, not expectant but leaving space for him to speak if he wants.

He really shouldn’t. He should make sure Robb is wholly unlike Jaime in every way possible, but it strikes him now that he’s been lonely, thinking of his children for years and never speaking of them. Too painful to discuss with Cersei, each of them bearing so much fault and anger and guilt. Brienne would have let him but it seemed unfair to ask her to and too vulnerable, to say such things to someone who knows him so well. He didn’t think he’d manage to ever stop if he started. Hasn’t been around Tyrion enough and he’s too sharp besides, and it’s not as though he’s ever had a single full conversation with Pod, poor bastard.

And that’s it, really. No one else that knows, either the secret or who he is enough to tell. Just him and the memory of Tommen’s shy hopeful smile.

“They didn’t - they didn’t last long,” he says, at length. “And I couldn’t be a good father to them when I had them.”

They walk in silence, the day so incongruously beautiful and full of life. It’s cool in the forest, deep and ancient, with elk tracks through the light dust of ash that’s made it this far in. The only sounds are the cow’s heavy footsteps, some distant birdsong, and a brief rustle of wind through the dead beech leaves that cling through fall and winter, waiting to be pushed out by new growth in the spring.

He bends his head to feel the soft hair of his son’s head against the broken skin of his nose. He doesn’t know if he just didn’t allow himself to feel this way before, if he’s somehow managed to forget what it was like, or if this is entirely new, this rush of feeling.

He thinks he must just have buried it. The feeling isn’t new at all, he remembers with a choking rush, but instead is far too familiar. This same pose, a golden child in his arms, being glad for one brief, stolen minute that whoever else he might have been, he was her father.

“World’s full of bad fathers,” Jona snorts derisively. 

They walk on and her voice turns thoughtful. “But they’re very resilient, children. They give you lots of chances.” _To be worthy of showing them the world,_ he fills in. _Or at least, to try._

They walk on in silence, the ox’s ears twitching in the wind.

“But you’re right,” she says later, when they stop by a stream. “They hurt even more going out.”

-

For years he didn’t believe himself capable of becoming a new man. He was who the world had made him, who he had made himself. The gulf between the kind of man he was and the kind of man who could have the future he thought so briefly he might be able to have with Brienne - glad days, warm nights, a child of his own - seemed too wide to cross. 

He knows a large part of Joffrey’s cruelty was fed by Cersei, by Robert’s example, by the unfettered power he held and the poisonous, privileged position he was born into and never knew as anything less than his absolute due. But he also wonders if the seed of violence might have been in Joffrey all along: something from him, or from Cersei, or from the roll of the dice when a prince is born. Maybe they could have made him less of a monster, if any of them other than Tyrion had honestly tried, but maybe they couldn’t have.

He wishes he knew if tyrants and cruel men and people broken inside arrived in the world already themselves or if they could somehow be made to choose differently. How many choices made in anger and violence tipped the scales to no return. How many chances his son will have to choose a more honourable path.

Jaime grieves his firstborn, loved him from his first breath to his last, but he wants to raise a better man than Joffrey. A much better man than himself. He can try to give the son sleeping against his chest all he can to make that happen, but the little boy is made of many parts, not many of which have ever been his to control. 

He looks - well, he looks like his mother. 

Jaime hopes he has her will to survive, her fierce protectiveness. He hopes too that it’s tempered by Tommen’s gentleness, Myrcella’s capacity for joy. He hopes his son has Tyrion’s mind, and Tyrion’s passion for feeding it. From Tywin - well, it’s an uncharitable thought but Tywin was the only one of them that at least didn’t choose to kill his life’s partner. God, what a family they were, what grief they all wreaked.

Jaime hopes his son will lose his heart, if he must, only to the gods and circumstance instead of his own deliberate cruelty. 

And from himself... Jaime thinks suddenly of Brienne again. Of the last conversation they'd had before he’d left Winterfell and the kind of man she had thought - right up until he proved her wrong - he was capable of becoming.

"I’m not an honourable person. I never have been and you know it. She’s hateful - and so am I.”

“I know what you are, Jaime Lannister.” 

The air was sharp and biting the afternoon before he’d left, when they’d both known his mind was made up but she had her teeth in the bit, determined to convince him of the same things she always had been. Her voice had sounded so sure.

“You’re making it sound inevitable but you don’t have to do this, you don’t have to go back to her. What more can you possibly owe her?”

“It’s all I’ve ever done, Brienne. It’s the only oath I’ve ever kept. It’s too late for me.”

“You always have a choice,” she said stolidly, shaking her head. “You think you’re the only one without one? We all make choices every day. Your choices have mattered to me, to Sansa, to everyone south of here who still draws breath because of us. How can you say it’s too late? That’s not true!”

He hadn’t known how explain to her that it was. The two of them might have saved each other a dozen times but he’s still done the things he’s done. He could pay all the debts he wanted and there’s still no ledger in the seven kingdoms could wipe them clean. They were who they were in the eyes of the world, and people were in the ground because of it. 

“I’ve always known she was who she was and I helped her anyway, I killed on her behalf and my own. I’m not a hero,” he said, feeling like he was chewing up dragonglass as the words came out. “Everyone else in Westeros knows exactly the kind of people she and I are.”

“Well of course the rest of them aren’t going to prevent you from becoming what you’re so determined to! You can’t pin this on people you’ve let believe a lie. I’m not talking about them, I’m talking about you. You get to decide, not anyone else.” She switched targets. "And you think so little of me, that you think I would defend you if I thought you a monster? You think that's the kind of man I would choose?"

Of course not, but he’d always known he didn’t deserve her. She had always been the better knight. He fought the impulse to lash out and hurt her, wondered if it would be better if she knew him for all the ugliness he’s been capable of, if she hated him as much as he did. He bit his own tongue before he could say _no, but what do you know of men or choosing them_ but she saw it on his face anyway, her own face closing in response.

The worst part was that he'd wanted so badly to believe she was right. He hadn't felt she was, but he’d wanted to believe it could be true. He’d known in his bones for years he’d squandered any honour he’d had and was unworthy of lying with her but he'd done it anyway because he was greedy too; because he wanted and so did she; because sometimes, with her, he felt he could be enough.

He hopes she was right. He’d thought she might have been. He hopes he's got enough capacity for valor left in him to try and raise a good man, a kind one. He’d at least like the chance to see if he can keep making the choice. 

-

He hears the birdsong fall silent first.

His first thought is to listen for the swoop of dragonwings overhead, but then his memory of the Kingswood catches up to him. Jaime’s frankly a little surprised it’s taken them this long to cross bandits. It’s only been a few days with everyone on the move either deeper into the forest or out of it. He supposes it’s thrown them off their natural patterns and hideouts, but has also given them ample opportunity to take advantage of the chaos.

“Jona,” he says in a low voice, conversationally. “Won’t you take the babe for a while.”

She looks at him in confusion - he hasn’t asked and she hasn’t offered, having been so far unwilling to be more than an arm’s-length away from the child. He scans his eyes around the forest and looks back at her and she unwraps the sling wordlessly, taking his son and stepping into the lee of the ox’s body.

“Hold!” the call comes when the longer of the two daggers is already in his hand. He forces himself to hold it by his side in a casual pose. 

Two men step out of the trees in front of them and he can hear at least one more behind. They don’t have swords and they relax at the sight of Jaime, who doesn’t yet return the favour. He finds himself irrationally jealous that they have enough men in their party for scouting and ambush.

“Coming from the capital?”

No sense in denying it. Jaime nods. “Escaped the dragonfire. Just.”

“Cersei’s dead, and the Dragon Queen too.”

The one with the long hair looks eager, as though he’s been looking for someone to crow to. Jaime revises his initial assessment: these men aren’t bandits. They’re likely still opportunistic enough to try and rob them, but they’re not highwaymen of the Kingswood. 

The men don’t seem to agree on who killed Daenerys - the man with the long hair swears he heard it was a Stark, the one with the red beard is adamant it was one of the Unsullied, and the tall man thinks The Imp poisoned her just like he did Joffrey.

Jaime’s not sure he believes she’s dead at all, given how information travels in Westeros, especially since there can’t be many ravens entering or exiting King’s Landing at the moment, but he’s willing to get what rumours he can. Perhaps, with the throne still in flux, his fate isn’t entirely sealed.

But no, he corrects himself, looking over at his son in Jona’s arms. Whatever becomes of Daenerys Targaryen, whoever emerges from the ashes to succeed her, his way forward is clear and divorced entirely from the throne and its mad queens.

The three men seem disappointed when they don’t have gossip of their own to share, and Jaime catches them eyeing the cow. “Managed to snatch some things, did you?” Bearded Man asks, jutting his chin towards the saddlebag slung over her broad back..

“Just clouts for the child,” he says. “No time to grab anything important.”

As expected, the men recoil at the mention of dirtied clouts, and lose interest. Jaime casually mentions that he saw some others branching west who were luckier and had time to grab all the fine carpets from their house, and the men head off eagerly.

Jona doesn’t say a word all afternoon, her arms fixed in a tight hold on the baby so Jaime can keep a dagger in his left hand. 

“Do you think it’s true?” she asks when they stop.

Jaime sets up two snares - they haven’t caught much yet but he saw marmot tracks and rabbit shit along the trail, and he hopes they’ll have something for breakfast. 

“Doubt it; not sure who could get past the dragon. Could be, though - I’d be surprised if anyone up there was left alive at the end of it.”

“Who rules if they’re both dead?”

Jaime grunts. “Don’t know much about kings or queens. Don’t suppose it matters much, and just means more fighting in the meantime.”

Jona hums. “‘Likely I shouldn’t head back quite yet then.”

He feels a sense of physical relief hearing she’ll stay with him a while longer. When they reach one of the villages scattered through the Kingswood he can buy a cow or a goat. He can leave behind the people who have seen him, who may yet recognize him for who he is.

But quite aside from her competence with children - she’d calmed him the day before after an alarming yellowish tinge took over the babe, saying it was normal and would pass with time - he doesn’t want to be alone. To travel with someone capable, to have both of them speak their fears or encouragements aloud, to share the workload of existence, to trust in someone and be trusted by them in return - that’s what he’s walking towards.

-

He had over a month riding south to think about it but Jaime’s plan had only got him as far as the Kingswood, and even that plan was mostly Arya’s. He had told Jona of a village outside Bronzegate in order to keep moving but now he has to think about what the best option is. As far as he can see it, he has three.

He can make for the sea and get on a ship and go as far as he possibly can, to one of the Free Cities or further, away from everything, far away from everyone who knows who he is. Other than the initial danger of securing passage it’s by far the safest option, once he’s actually off the ship. If Robert’s knife could reach all the way across the world for Daenerys he imagines her dragonfire can do the same for him, but it’s less immediately treacherous, given his infamy here. He’ll never be fully anonymous in Westeros.

He can make a gamble on finding an ally nearby to shelter them: Longtable, or Guilan Swann at Stormhold, perhaps. Bide his time. Cutting west and making for Lannister land is out of the question - his strongest allies are in the Westerlands but if she’s still alive after all it’s likely the next place Daenerys will raze, and if she’s dead he can’t rely on Tyrion’s sympathy or influence either. The place will be ashes long before he gets there. There’s no way he can make it all the way north and escape detection, and he doubts Sansa would be as forgiving a second time, given she only spared him last time on the word of a woman she thinks he left to the snow. The option of choosing a castle to trust is the most foolhardy, since there’s no way to know for certain how any lord in the Stormlands will swear and even sympathetic allies still know the price of gold. He doubts any of them want to be the one to tilt at a dragon.

Lastly - he can do what he told Jona he was going to do. Find a village. Learn a trade. Become the poor farming father he’s passing himself off as. Get a hound or two, maybe. Hide in plain sight and fade away.

It’s dangerous to settle so close to King’s Landing but it’s not something anyone looking for him would ever expect of him, so it has that going for it. It sounds difficult, and hardscrabble, and full of rude surprises and hungry nights, but he’s rather surprised to realize it’s not his least favourite option of the three.

He racks his tired brain, fuzzy from waking every few hours to feed the baby, trying to pull up maps and crests and loyalties. ‘Fuck the Baratheons’ has been the extent of his life’s thought on the Stormlands, but he’s travelled the area and surely he can remember something, some minor lord or coastal city he’s not thinking of.

His thought crosses the Narrow Sea and back again, casting about, and he nearly laughs aloud.

Of course. 

How could he have forgotten. 

-

He’d known of Tarth his whole life, but to hear Brienne tell of it made it an entirely new place in his imagination. The startling natural beauty, the mountains and waterfalls and alpine meadows. Giant mountain goats, jumbled Andal ruins, brilliant blue water. A spine of mountains with hidden valleys running down the island like the stripe on a dun horse. 

She’d talked of it some on their original journey to King’s Landing and he’d asked for more at Winterfell. She’d told stories of a younger Brienne and days spent exploring, learning the whole length of the island, climbing its cliffs and scouting for porpoises. Her love for Tarth shone through just as the hurt it had inflicted upon her and the stories she didn’t tell but that he could hear nonetheless: a lonely childhood, an adolescence pitted with cruelty, a loved father left alone and so far failed. The hold it still held on her heart.

To hear it had filled him with a kind of yearning too. He’d never held that much space in himself for a particular place that he longed to return to. Casterly Rock meant nothing but boredom and duty and memories of his mother. King’s Landing held a higher claim, people he had saved and failed and walked among, but it was a responsibility steeped in pain.

Despite Lord Selwyn’s reputation as a good man, he’s quite certain that even if he were to receive an unbloody reception on Tarth it would nonetheless be a chilly one. The only things the Evenstar knows of Jaime Lannister are the things he’s let the world repeat unchallenged and encouraged. She’s not there to speak for him, and any claims he might make to her in her absence will be belied by the child of another in his arms. What’s more, it’s an island, so if something goes wrong, he’s trapped.

It’s not a good idea, or a particularly smart one. But it’s also far from his worst. 

-

He and Jona part ways at the edge of the forest. By now everyone they meet along the way seems to be in agreement that both Daenerys and Cersei are dead, and Jon Snow and Tyrion both jailed in what remains of the cells. The throne was destroyed and no one has yet stepped forward to claim it, although the Unsullied hold the city. The little peace is uneasy - there’s no one to authorize or pay for repairs, and no one to work if there was payment. So much destruction, no city watch, the area patrolled by people who don’t know it and don’t care to.

The people they talk to don’t seem to be waiting in anticipation of the next move but already resigned to it. Maybe there will be another war, and maybe there won’t. Maybe there will be a king to figure out what everyone’s going to eat, but in the meantime it’s each for themselves. The survivors of King’s Landing have moved up into the crownlands in search of farmland not covered by ash, and there’s no active fighting. For now.

There’s a group of actors heading to Maidenpool that Jona can travel back with for protection, and now he has a plan. Jaime quietly pays her for the ox, which has come to tolerate his clumsy one-handed milkings with waterskin held between his knees. 

“Take care of yourself, Robb,” she says, squinting up at him. “You and the young man there. You were lucky to get out when you did.”

“Thank you,” he says. “I don’t mean to waste it.”

“Good. Still got at least a few years left in us, you and I.”

They do, and Jaime doesn’t intend to choke on ash for the rest of them. They nod at each other, strangely formal after three weeks on the road together, and he watches her walk away. Wishes he could have paid her five times over for the ox; would have, in fact, if doing so wouldn’t have given away who he was. Wishes too that he could keep track of her, tell her where to find them or find some way to thank her.

“Aren,” he calls to her back.

Jona stops, turning back to face him.

“His name is Aren,” Jamie says.

She raises her eyebrows. “What’s that then? Family name?”

“No,” he says, feeling his son’s legs drum against his stomach. He’s never met an Aren, he doesn’t think. It’s not from a story. The name is new to him.

“It’s just... simple.”

She nods once more - approvingly, he thinks. “Most things are,” she says, turning back to the forest.

-

Near Bronzegate he writes a letter.

He’s itching to send fistfuls of ravens and find out exactly what’s going on, but he has no access to a castle or a maester who would let anyone but the lord send one, and he’s not sure he ever will again, so he has to trust it to the regular mail-carriers.

Any letter addressed to Tyrion will no doubt be immediately opened and read by everyone who crossed its path up to and including his captors and every barwench in the Stormlands, and all his other allies are too far away or in cities whose mail system is no doubt destroyed.

The last thing he wants to do is create a paper trail of his movements, but he owes himself one chance, and sending it from Bronzegate should give him leeway to go where he will afterwards undetected. For all his plan might be to fall off the map, he wants to shoot one arrow, leave one notch in a tree.

He addresses the letter to Evenfall Hall, unsigned but with a preface asking that it be forwarded to Lady Brienne, from a comrade who fought alongside her at Winterfell who wishes to let her know that he has indeed found the waters of Tarth as beautiful as he’d always imagined from her tales.

He keeps moving. He would prefer to stay out of sight but keeps to the road for Aren’s sake. Jona had been knowledgeable but there were many things that fell outside even her capabilities, requiring help from others. A clout rash she knew there to be a good ointment for necessitated a stop in a village since she couldn’t make it herself; a three-day streak of fussing resulted in a coven of women at a crossroad, three heads bent deep in deliberation over the boy.

Every time this happened, his whole body filled with panic - every question meant more people who had seen them, more people who had spoken to them and could speak to others about them. But he couldn’t explain this to Jona, who took it as fact that they could stop anyone and ask for help. There seemed to be a whole unspoken network of Westerosi women who adhered to their own knightly code: one could always speak to another and ask for aid on behalf of a child. To be so obviously in need in front of other people felt to Jaime like exposing his side during a fight - but Aren had stayed blessedly healthy under all the attention and each time it became slightly easier to knock on someone’s door. He hopes he’ll still be able to access the invisible chain of knowledge along the road himself without Jona to make introductions or know what to ask.

He stops walking every day well before he would have back when he travelled alone or with an army. The ox appreciates the grazing time, and he appreciates the moments in the daylight to look at Aren. He’s beginning to be able to focus his eyes now, fascinated by Jaime’s hairline, the contrast between light and dark. His eyes are still newborn blue, not yet green like his parents’. He prefers to eat small amounts very frequently, which is extremely annoying, and spends a lot of his waking hours crying, which is doubly so. Jaime feels constantly on edge trying to determine every time whether each fresh round of crying is with or without just cause. 

He’s not yet able to lift his head on his own or reliably grab any of the items he determinedly waves his fist after. Jona said some things might come slower since he was born so early, and even now he’s barely the weight a healthy newborn babe would have been. 

Jaime talks to him all day and in the evenings, narrating as he sets his snares or uses the net he got at Wendwater. He makes observations on the weather and their surroundings and the truly ugly wattle hanging down from the cow’s neck, and Aren burps and wheezes and cries back at him. He tells stories of Ser Duncan the Tall, of Dreamfyre, old Dornish tales and tournament stories and The Bear and the Maiden Fair. He tries to get reactions back, catalogues each and every one. The first time Aren scares himself sneezing, Jaime laughs until he cries, sending a spray of startled birds shooting out of a tree into the sky.

He’d talked non-stop the whole way down to King’s Landing with Brienne too, fascinated by her and desperate for real conversation. 

He smells the sea before he sees it, nearly a full day’s walk away. He’d found a reliable stream and stuck with it for the past few days, knowing it would lead him to the ocean. It’s rained for two days which means none of the clean clouts will dry, so Aren’s been screaming and Jaime’s had a damp, angry child lashed to his chest and feels closer to toppling over than he has in years.

They spend most of the afternoon tramping through a huge open meadow, the mud sucking at Jaime’s boots and the cow’s hooves, not a tree to be found. He keeps walking past when it’s dark, hoping to find shelter, and has to settle for a pitiful shrub on the bank of the stream where it widens.

Aren has settled into constant whimpering that escalates into full-blown cries of anguish whenever Jaime has to step away from him - to milk the ox, to wash his clout, to pile pieces of an old stump into a low wall to protect them from the wind.

“I’m doing this for you,” Jaime grits in response, which obviously does nothing, because Aren still wants what he wants and screams for it, cold and wet and yearning and all of a sudden Jaime sits like a man felled, water dripping down his face, alone in the middle of the Stormlands, far away from everyone he’s ever known. He left Brienne, rode away from her and everything he’d wanted so desperately to try to have. He left Cersei to die alone, as good as killed her himself, bore his child out of the room and left behind his sister, his love, abandoning her, the one thing he’d never thought he’d be capable of.

He doesn’t miss Cersei. Hasn’t thought of her in weeks except to worry if anyone’s noticed she died after having delivered a child and not before. He’s tried not to think about the last time he saw her, blocking it off in hot shame and furious anger, and even before he left her for dead in King’s Landing he hadn’t missed her.

She had been the only thing that mattered for his entire life and then he threw her away. 

And she deserved it, and he should have done it years ago, and she must have known a cruel end was coming for her. She’d done nearly everything in her power to cement it.

He can almost hear Brienne’s voice telling him that the anguish he feels is more about who he is than who she had been; that he feels this way because it’s something he still has the capacity for, not because it’s something she had still been worthy of. 

He’s braced on elbows and knees over Aren, blocking the persistent rain with his body, watching his small limbs move unencumbered by the swaddling sling, and cries with his son for his mother, who would have loved him.

-

They follow the coast when they reach it until they come to Parchments. A pottery trader says he normally stops at Starport on Tarth to make extra money taking mail before he carries on to Essos, and takes Jaime and a handful of men looking for work that far.

The pottery trader tells them of a new king, a Stark ruling what’s left of Westeros. Jaime nearly can’t stop himself from reacting when he hears it, has to work as hard as he ever has to school his face. First he kills kings and then he makes them, apparently. It’s an awful thing to say even in his mind and he can see the frown Brienne would make if he said it aloud, mouth pursed and trying not to dignify him with a response.

Tyrion is alive, apparently, which fills him with overwhelming relief even though it’s clear everyone else on the boat feels otherwise at the news. Nobody knows what his fate may be or what any of this means for them, although they speculate endlessly about all the vacant lordships.

He leaves Starport as soon as he arrives, speaking with no one, following a road south into Tarth’s interior and away from the port city full of talkers and travellers. Mountains rise along the right of the road and cliffs drop away to the left, the air thick with seabirds. 

He’s only passed a pair of towns in two days’ slow walk from Starport, but the coastal trail is still worn with travel and after another half-day he reaches a third one, clustered around a bay with a stone jetty. He can see another small collection of houses at the foot of a waterfall a bit further inland. There’s an inn with light in its windows at the heart of the village.

As good a place as any for the newly born.

So Jaime stays.

-

He’s bent over behind the bar when Nelane bangs in the door asking why the Lady Brienne is looking for him.

Jaime turns around so quickly he smacks his forehead off the beam, hard enough that he feels some sawdust fall out of the ceiling and into his hair.

“What?” he wheezes, blinking through the pain.

“Karl’s come in from Bancroft and says Lady Brienne’s been there asking if anyone’s seen a one-handed man come to town a few months ago.”

Nelane passes him a cold cloth to put on his forehead as he tries to uncross his eyes. They’re at the inn’s wide oak counter, not crowded with the few travellers still abed in the morning and no one from town in yet for their afternoon draught. Jaime’d been taking inventory of the tankards and setting aside ones for cleaning or replacement, checking on Aren every so often in the small room in the back beside the storeroom, where he’s asleep on the sheepskin. It’s quiet - about the quietest it’s been since he broke up a barfight on his second night in Banmorden and ended up helping run the inn for nearly five months now, keeping books, managing trade and gleaning information out of everyone who passes through.

“And what does she want with a one-handed man?” Jaime asks as Nelane starts wiping down the bar.

She shrugs. “Apparently she wasn’t saying, but she’s looking for someone, asked folk to keep an eye out and let her know. Maybe a thief, or perhaps she knows of a pirate hiding out here. Doesn’t the Kingslayer only have one hand now?”

Bancroft was only the next town north of Banmorden and Ban’s Falls. Jaime had rather thought it would take more time for this to happen, but perhaps his letter had done the trick.

“Well,” he says, taking a deep breath. “Not sure I’ll be much use, in that case. Did Karl tell her about me?”

“Ask him yourself, I wasn’t there. I imagine someone has, seeing as you fit the bill and it’s not like we get new one-handed in folk every month with the grain. Go on and see if we’ve any nice wine and ask Rud to put a pig aside, since the lady’s like to come to town soon.”

Jaime hums absently.

“Not to worry, Weslar,” she says, pulling the cloth away to inspect what he’s sure is a rising lump on his forehead. “Lady Brienne’s a fair judge, they say. If you’re not the scoundrel she’s looking for I’m sure you won’t have to pay for his crimes.”

“Just my own,” he says ruefully, touching his fingers to his head. 

-

Jaime doesn’t have time to track down Karl and find out what he said before he hears a brief commotion in the front room and the door to the inn’s storeroom swings open.

He can barely believe it’s her standing in front of him. 

He’d somehow managed to forget how tall she was. 

His whole ride south to the capital he was so sure he’d never see her again, a future he’d forfeited, but every step he took away from King’s Landing he’d been equally sure he’d find his way to her somehow, one way or another. He deserved her less than he ever had but at last felt totally sure he knew what he wanted. He knew he’d left his right to her behind on her pillow and didn’t expect to get another chance, but had to see her. He’d made the choice and now he had to make an attempt.

It’s not like he’d ever let knowing what he wanted was wrong stop him from trying.

She’s shorn her hair slightly differently, closer against her neck but longer on the top over her broad cheeks. He’s not sure what his face looks like but he imagines it’s quite stupid, entirely gobsmacked.

“You came here?” Her voice is incredulous, accusatory.

“Well, so did you,” he says.

“You came _here_ ,” she repeats.

He’s not sure if he should flatter himself that she can’t quite believe he’d found a way to come back to her, or if it’s more that she’s aghast at his poor planning and lowly circumstances.

“Well, you made it sound very scenic.”

“Oh, was that all,” she says, sarcastically.

The silence stretches out and he bites back any further attempts at humour, wants to say something real but unsure how to start. Brienne’s brow furrows and she looks, for once in her life, inscrutable.

“I never,” he finally says, wanting to explain. “I never imagined you’d come, I wasn’t trying to - summon you.”

“Weren't you.” Her voice is flat.

“No. I mean, I didn’t think you would… I certainly don’t expect - I know I…”

Her eyes flash with hurt, her chin tucking back in a recoil and he understands suddenly, too late as always, that apparently it actually isn’t too late at all and is too shocked with a tidal wave of humility to open his mouth before she does.

She splutters at him. “You don’t expect - you left half your hand in our - in my bed! What on earth was I meant to think! Was that not a promise?”

“It was an apology,” he says, because that’s how he’d meant it.

But she wasn’t wrong either, even if she’d known it before he did and he does promise, he does. He’d wanted to promise the whole time but didn’t think he was allowed and now she is, against all odds, telling him the claim was his to make all along.

“I don’t want your apologies,” she says stiffly. 

“Well, you’re welcome to them all the same,” he says, spreading his arms. “You’re certainly owed enough.”

She looks at him, mistrust and hurt in her eyes, stubborn chin set. He swallows. “And all the rest of it, too,” he says quietly. “Everything. It’s all yours. Brienne.”

She keeps looking at him. 

He wants to keep talking, to tell her, to make sure she knows: that he wanted to give her everything but never felt he could; that he’s fully aware he isn’t owed much of anything, let alone to be by her side. That he wants her, of course he wants her, but doesn’t think she should tie herself to someone who would ride away from her for someone like Cersei. 

But he knows anything he could say would be something she already knows and worse, she wouldn’t want to hear it. No tavern in the world took self-pity as currency. She’s always wanted him to believe he was exactly as deserving as anyone else who was willing to stand up for others. That he had the ability to be as worthy as he wanted to be. That each of them gets to choose for themselves, and that the choice is the thing that matters. 

He still remembers how he felt that night on the trail south with the Boltons after he lost his hand and tried to let himself die in the dirt. After she commanded him to live, and he tipped his filthy head back, and confessed to the stars over the crackle of the fire.

“Frankly, I don’t think I’m strong enough.”

He’d tried to say the words in his usual disaffected tone but could tell he hadn’t succeeded. 

She’d had no patience for it then either. “Oh? And how do you think get strong?”

He’d learned to use a blade again. Hadn’t managed to die fighting shoulder to shoulder to her in the snow parting creatures made of gore and memory and malice. He’d told someone who he was and had them catch him when he fell. He’d stuck his finger in a baby’s mouth and been taught how to live.

That’s what she’d been saying the entire time, he knows - her whole life has been fighting with her one left hand. Choosing to pick up the blade and practice every morning, choosing every day what to fight for. That’s how you get strong enough.

He rakes his eyes over her - colour in her cheeks and holding herself wooden as a spear, Oathkeeper still strapped to her hip.

“How did you find - did you get the letter, then?”

“Yes, I got your extraordinarily stupid letter,” she snaps. “What on earth were you thinking?”

“I thought it was rather clever, myself,” he says.

“You think everything you do is clever.”

“Brienne,” he says.

She meets his eyes. “Jaime.” 

“I’m sorry,” he says, the words thick in his throat.

They’re standing close together, in this small dark storeroom of an inn on the eastern coast of Tarth. The air smells warm and slightly sour, yeast from the bread and the beer. The light is thin and gold through the one small window, a break of mid-morning sun. She’s less than a foot away from him, close enough to touch, the air between them filled with dust and distance that he wants badly to close.

The silence is shattered with a loud child’s cry, followed by a woman hollering “Weslar! He’s up!”

He winces as the cries rise in volume, moving past Brienne with his forearm on hers. She raises her eyebrows. “Weslar, is it now?”

“You’re about four names behind, you have some catching up to do,” he replies, winking as he walks out of the room towards the cries.

He doesn’t realize she’s following him until he turns around, Aren in his arms still hiccuping the last of the tears he’d shed at awaking to find himself alone.

“You did it,” she says, staring at the baby - who is now thankfully somewhat plumper than he used to be, due to the long naps in a warm inn and Nelane’s sister, who has a new babe of her own and has been happy to play wet nurse in exchange for Jaime writing out her letters for her. “You actually managed to do it.”

“Now now, my lady, your lack of faith in me is unbecoming,” he says, checking Aren’s clout and then working his son’s curious fingers out of his hair, which has grown too long and has thus proven a constant temptation to baby fingers.

He winces internally as soon as he says it, since a lack of faith in him would in fact have been entirely justified.

“I thought you might have,” she says slowly, still looking at them. “But when I heard what a mess the city was, I wasn’t sure, until I heard from Arya…”

“She does deserve some credit, I suppose,” he concedes.

He desperately doesn’t want to talk about King’s Landing - wants her to know without him having to tell her. He thinks she might know some of it, if she’s spoken to Arya. Thinks she might know anyway, the same way she’d somehow known his mind when she’d let him ride away.

“Speaking of things I did,” he says instead, “This is Aren.” 

He looks down at his son’s face, hitching him higher on his hip with his right arm. 

“This is Brienne,” he tells him, small serious face and round cheeks looking up at them, little fists making another snatch at his hair. “This is the brave knight I told you about.” 

-

It doesn’t take Banmorden long to realize their lady is among them, and Brienne has to spend the rest of the day meeting with the local leaders and making enquiries into farming and fishing and inspecting each individual wheat stalk and wheel axel or whatever it was Tywin had always had someone else do on his behalf. She defers all decisions or promises on behalf of her father, since apparently she’s helping Sansa repair the North and not back to be their Evenstar just yet.

“So why was she looking for you? You wanted for ransom? A deserter? Some long-lost cousin?”

Karl has been dogging Jaime’s steps all day, seeming anxious that he’d turned Jaime in to his lady and as yet unsure if that had been a good decision on his part.

“Not sure yet,” Jaime says. He wants to make the joke he would once have made about Brienne carrying men off over her shoulder and grinding their bones to make her bread, but can’t muster the enthusiasm and doesn’t want to encourage her subjects to do the same. 

“But she knows you? You’ve met her before, then?”

“We fought together - before.”

Karl laughs in disbelief before realizing Jaime is serious. “You? And her? What’d you fight, an army of ghosts? A feather bed?” 

Near enough, he thinks. Both, one right after the other. “Either one of us could have dumped you with our left hand before we were eight,” he says. “And frankly I’d put money on Aren over you as soon as he gets a full set of teeth.”

Nelane has used the afternoon to air out the inn’s nicest room, which is not actually very nice at all but has a working window with a view of the sea. “We’ve never had an Evenstar here before,” she says to Jaime as he carries up the good wine on her request, despite knowing that Brienne won’t have any unless she’s sufficiently goaded or loosened up before. “Just the steward through for the census every few years and a knight once.”

“She’s a knight as well,” he says. “Knighted at Winterfell during the Long Night.”

“Gods, she’s a fearsome one,” says Nelane. “Not many houses can say they’ve a bannerwoman, I warrant. Hold this sheet for me, I need to tighten the edge.”

Nelane is expecting “every he-dog in town” to come through the inn to sup with their lady and plans to collar young Toddam from the stables to help serve, but Brienne says she’ll take her dinner in her room. “Have - him - wait on me,” she says to a disappointed Nelane, cutting herself off with a nod at Jaime when she’s clearly unable to remember his alias.

Jaime settles Aren in their small room beside the storeroom. Nelane’s sister has told him he ought to start putting the boy to bed before he’s properly asleep to let him figure out how to calm himself down without Jaime there, but they both find it hard to bear. They’ve been more or less attached since the minute Aren came into the world, chest to chest, never out of his sight, a heart on the outside of his own.

Nelane’s prediction has come true and the inn is packed, her with both her hands full and no young Toddam to be seen, the shirker. Jaime absolutely intends to copy his example. He climbs the stairs, tray balanced across his forearms, and kicks at Brienne’s door so she can turn the handle and let him in.

“I had to drag this up several sets of stairs and I think she’ll cry if it’s unopened in the morning, so _I’m_ going to have some,” he says, uncorking the wine with his teeth and pouring two glasses. “To your health, my lady.”

He drains his in one go, though it tastes like vinegar. “Truly terrible, as I expected, but then I haven’t seen a grape since I got here. Really, you’re not that far from Dorne, you’d think some decent wine would float north once a shipwreck or so -”

“Jaime.”

He waves her off, pouring another. “The beer’s not bad, I’ll give it that, but that’s largely down to the talents of the alewives of Banmorden, anything from out of town is ghastly. Next thing you know I’ll be sticking to tea like some sort of-”

“Jaime!” 

This time he stops and hears what she hears - a crackle, and raised voices. She flings the window open and he can smell salt, and fish, and - smoke.

Their eyes meet and then they’re racing down the stairs and out the front, where Jaime can see flames in the stable beside the inn. Someone’s already darted close to flip the latch, shirt over their nose, and the yard is full of loose horses.

A few men are running down to the ocean with buckets, and Jaime sticks his head back into the inn and tells everyone at the two tables by the door to run for more buckets and basins. He comes back out to find Brienne tasking two men with catching the horses and a third with warning the families in the houses behind the barn.

Soon everyone has poured out of the inn, most of them standing around gawking until Brienne starts shouting at them. Jaime and Rud the butcher stop the men from running back and forth to the ocean with their own buckets and instead form two lines to pass them, shoving the gawkers into place.

There’s always a sea breeze coming off the Narrow Sea and tonight’s no exception - soon the crackle turns to a roar and joins the shouts and screams of panicked horses. He knows they’ve lost the barn and directs a second line of buckets to coat the walls of the houses to the south and the inn, ten yards to the other side.

“Aren,” he says, suddenly, looking at the smoke drifting over the inn and Brienne meets his eyes. “I’ll get him,” she says, and ducks back inside. 

Nelane stands beside him as they watch the stables go up, no stopping it now. The sound picks up, yelling and the rush of fire and something - “Nelane,” he says urgently. “There was no one in the barn.”

“No,” she starts, and then she grabs his arm, a gasp so big he can hear it even over the - yes, that’s a cry from the barn. “Toddam!”

Fucking hell. Jaime grabs a bucket making its way up the line and upends it over himself before running to the front of the barn and in, where the large frame of the door leaves a gap through the flames.

He opens his mouth to yell and nearly falls over, the heat and smoke hitting him like the side of a horse, his throat full and his eyes streaming and everything suddenly moving slower.

He stays in the main aisle, the straw on fire at his feet, and presses on into the barn, trying to see, trying to hear, trying to - yes, there, at the top of the ladder, a slim black outline against the orange roof of the old barn.

The ladder is about to go if hasn’t already, and he fights his way to the bottom, dodging a falling beam and beating frantically at his sleeve when it catches in the spray of sparks. “Toddam!” he yells, opening his arms, hoping the boy can see him. “Jump!”

The figure above doesn’t move except to pace back and forth, and he waves his arms again. The boy above him, petrified and trapped, nowhere to go but down. He feels dizzy, overwhelmed, he needs to jump, he needs to catch him, not another one, he needs to catch him, please - he only has seconds - and then he’s hit with the full weight of a twelve year old about the ribs. They both go down, Jaime curling over him as the ladder collapses in a fiery heap beside them.

Jaime wraps his arm around the boy as they stagger to their feet and they make for - the exit, where did he come in, where is the door. He can’t see it, he doesn’t know where - there, he thinks, the flames moving around a shape somewhere in front of them.

Each step drags, the body under his arm and his own feeling so heavy, his lungs screaming. Nowhere to go but wherever he chooses to put his foot next, an inferno on all sides.

And then another wall, the cold night air sending another shock to his lungs as they stagger into the courtyard, into life.

Someone grabs them both and pulls them away from the barn, down to the water’s edge and away from the air thick with smoke. Jaime falls to his knees, his eyes streaming and his clothes steaming. Toddam is coughing next to him, shaking like a leaf.

Everything moves in a blur, his vision all bright orange and deep indigo, voices indistinct. Someone presses a mug of ale into his hands and tries to make him drink, tugging his smoking boots off, Toddam being pulled away, someone taking the child, no, stop, someone pulling Myrcella away, pulling the child away, out of his arms... He comes back to himself slowly, taking big swallows and letting something other than smoke coat his throat.

The barn is gone, completely engulfed. With the fire at its height now he can tell the inn will be saved, as long as the wind doesn’t turn - thank the gods the town was built on a slope, with wide drainage ditches from the houses up the hill curving around the barn and creating gaps between the buildings.

He sees Nelane, safe in the door of the inn, her arms around her lover Alysanne, watching in somber silence. Young Toddam on the jetty being fussed over and yelled at by all six of his siblings. Rud directing men with buckets to chase down any wayward sparks as beams fall.

Brienne, standing right in front of him, holding Aren.

She looks like some illustration of a tale from Aegon the Conqueror - the Fire Knight, face lit up in a blaze with sea waves for eyes, bright hair become a flame of its own in the night, a babe in her arms. His son, wide face startled and fascinated, yanked first from life and then from sleep into a screaming, burning world. Held by Brienne’s strong arms and wide hands, safe from the fire. His two torches, tall and true and here, finally, right in front of him. 

_Safe_ , he thinks, and then receives his third shock of the evening when an entire bucket of numbingly cold sea water pours over him from behind.

“If your bed wasn’t warm enough all you had to do was ask, oaf!” Karl says, shaking him by the shoulders in relieved admonishment.

Jaime trips him neatly, sending him backwards into the sea, and rises unsteadily to his feet to help Rud find places to put the horses.

-

Finally, near dawn, the fire gutters itself out, nothing but the smoking frame of the barn. Jaime leaves a group of them still dousing the ashes and sluices himself in water from the rain barrel behind the inn, scrubbing until soot stops running out of his hair and down his neck like ink. His throat is still on fire.

He climbs the stairs, intending to confiscate the rest of the wine from Brienne’s room and finds her there, removing her boots.

She straightens, fixing him with a glare. “You absolute idiot,” she seethes as he sinks down onto a stool with a sigh. “What were you thinking?”

He shrugs, trying to focus on pouring wine and not letting his hand shake. “Well I was thinking that you know what they say, fire cannot kill a - oh wait, damn, that one’s not mine, you’re right. Bugger.”

This only makes her angrier. “You could have been killed!”

“Yes, that was very clear to me, thank you, but I’ve left enough people for dead to last me for one lifetime. Let’s neither of us pretend you wouldn’t have done the same and save ourselves the trouble, shall we?” He bites it out and then looks away, closing his sore eyes and hunching over. He takes the wine in small sips to try to soothe his burning throat.

He hears a chair scrape and then silence, and suddenly there are fingers in his hair, tugging his head back to face her.

“How many times, Jaime Lannister,” she says, “Am I going to have to command you to stay alive?” 

“At least twice a day, every day, from now on,” he responds without skipping a beat, before he can think better of it. “That should do it.” 

She looks away, nearly rolling her eyes, but her cheeks are bright pink so he can’t bring himself to regret it.

“Don’t worry,” he says, his mouth feeling too empty and his head too full. “I find I’m quite committed to the prospect, these days.”

Her eyes come back to meet his, full of relief and fading anger and something else, something he knows is reflected in his own. 

“Sleep,” she says, and he nods, willing to obey any command she’ll give him and choosing to ignore the muttered insult she tacks onto the end. 

He swallows the rest of the wine and stands. He strips naked, stepping out of all his sodden, smoky clothes and falling into the bed he laid this afternoon, what feels like a year ago. The waves crash against the jetty outside, their steady pattern at high tide relentless and affirming.

He sleeps.

-

It’s raining when he wakes, the light grey and streaky through the window. He blinks dirt out of his eyes, rolling onto his front to grope for the tankard of water on the floor. _Aren_ he thinks, his son always his first thought and his last, and then remembers he’ll be with Nelane’s sister. He falls back into the bed, the momentum pressing a heavy weight along his side. Brienne is a line of warmth the entire length of the bed, her hair in her eyes and her knees curled up over his to keep her feet from sticking over the edge.

He looks over and sees her start to wake at his movements, frowning at the light and then at him before her face goes as soft as he’s sure his is.

He’s here, bare and awake, in Brienne’s bed, thousands of miles from the place he left it. They’re alive, as whole as they’ll ever be. And naked.

He sees her register it and watches a whole journey, up and over all the hills from here to Winterfell, cross her open window of a face: from embarrassment to apprehension to something like defiance and back to wariness. Naked but still wearing all her armour beneath the sheet, as though Oathkeeper lay between them where he had once built his own wall. He moves slowly but surely, sliding his hand over her hip and around to stroke the long lines of her back, skin so incongruously soft.

Their faces are a hand’s-width apart on the pillow. He meets her eyes, swallowing everything he thinks of to say, promises and apologies and defenses and questions like the way Aren is learning to babble nonsense at him, shouts and admonishments and happy responses, eager for all there is to learn. She already knows. He spreads his hand wide, five fingers across her back, and tries to think of how to tell her that he’ll never leave her again. _I’m here,_ he thinks, the truest it’s ever been. 

She studies him, her crooked knight, and he closes his eyes as she leans forward to take his mouth, kissing him warm and claiming.

He falls back, rolling her on top of him to keep her mouth on his as her arms wrap around his neck and all their skin comes together, hot gladness wrapping him up and sending a lance of joy through his stomach and out the other side, pinning him to the bed.

He’s spent a not-inconsiderable amount of time imagining exactly what he wanted to do to Brienne if he ever found himself in her arms again - but now they’re here there’s no desperation, no urgency. Just slow sure hunger, his tongue in Brienne’s mouth and her fingers in his hair, his heart in his aching throat.

He slides his hand down to her thigh, pulling it all the way over his, asking for her weight on him. He licks into her, feeling her breath gust along his cheek with every exhale, their bodies moving, remembering, asking. It hits him like a wave, everything he’s ever wanted, Brienne brave and he hers.

They kiss for long minutes, steady and warm. Every movement sends a building heat through to his bones, and he’s suddenly, achingly hard. He strokes his fingers through the gathering sweat in the small of her back, coaxing, encouraging her to press against him, finding again the gift they can give each other.

“Jaime,” she gasps, the best sound he’s ever heard. She says it once more breathlessly, pulling her mouth away as her head falls forward, rubbing against him in a long slide. Her back curls into it and she’s hot and wet suddenly against his thigh and he groans, kissing her neck, tongue and beard and lips finding the crook and setting themselves there, wanting to hear her say his name again.

“Brienne,” he rasps, his voice a wreck, stitching itself back from burnt tatters just like the rest of him, her body alongside his, over his, cheek to cheek as she rides his leg, slick and bold.

He kisses her neck again, her ear, her shoulder, her jaw, everything he can reach, loving her with his mouth as he moves his left hand from her thigh to his cock, needing to join her.

She moans, pressing into him everywhere, and skims her hand down to take over from him, squeezing too tight around his fist and sliding her thumb up the length of him. “Let me,” she says, her cheeks as red as a banner and her chest heaving.

He groans again, moving his hand away so she can keep going, sword calluses rough and perfect circling the head of his cock, shy but not gentle. “You’ll be glad to hear,” he grinds out, unable to look away from her hand on him, “That I took your - criticism to heart and I’ve... actually gotten very good at accepting help.”

The fingers of her left hand tighten in his hair and he bucks up into her, responding like a knife on a whetstone. “Still no good at - not - talking,” she pants, her hips moving in deep, hungry rolls, the heat of her cunt against him driving him mad.

“Mm,” he says, feeling like his voice is going to bleed, flayed and raw. “Haven’t gotten any better at that, sorry to say.”

She moves her hand up, stroking his cock in a tight grip, so good with her talented hands, and he bites at her ear, whispering into it. “But feel free to find better things for me to do with my mouth.”

The noise she makes is one that sounds like she’s fighting on the field, uncontrolled and from the very depths of her. Suddenly he wants nothing more than to get his mouth on her and he tries to urge her up but she flips them again, spreading her legs wide and pulling Jaime down, down to kiss her, down to join her, sliding his fingers in to feel her clench around them, his cock slippery against the inside of her thigh.

“Jaime,” she says breathlessly, an edge of pleading, putting him right where she wants him, her legs around his hips as he fits into her, both of them groaning with it, pleasure and relief.

“I’m here,” he says, sweat in his eyes, kissing her and loving her, grinding in deep where he knows she loves the pressure, feeling the need lick up his spine. 

This time he knows he’s talking, still can’t stop himself, promising everything into her mouth. “You were there, you were there the whole time, gods I missed you, dreamed of you, every night Brienne, going to fuck you every night, going to have you, going to fuck you, wanted you the whole time, always, going to -” 

She bites his mouth, bites his lip again and he tilts her hips up, rubbing at her with his thumb in wide slick circles. He drinks in the look on her face as they move together. He could do this for the rest of his life, watching her whole body jerk with it, helpless, her legs holding him to her, only closing his eyes when his whole body surrenders, coming deep inside her, helpless too.

It’s several minutes before he comes back to himself enough to hear the rain against the window, the sounds of the tide going out, the noise of people hammering and sawing outside. Building already. Brienne’s deep breaths, her skin warm against his, the susurrations of their bodies under the bedding, the cry of a child below.

He closes his eyes, waiting for the familiar roil of guilt that doesn’t come. He’s still a thief, in this bed with Brienne. He’s kept and torn up enough ledgers to know that. Of course he shouldn’t get to have this life, to walk beside her, to watch his son grow, to swing himself up on a horse and ride away.

But he’d be a fool to choose any different, an idiot not to sink his claws into life and hang on, take all the grace he can find and drink deep of it.

It’s unlikely anyone could really be said to be worthy, he supposes, and certainly not him, but he finds he’s very willing - very much looking forward, in fact - to spending the rest of his life trying to be.

-

“Da!” Aren greets Jaime when he eventually hauls himself out of bed and makes his way three doors up the street to claim him from Nelane’s sister Penna.

He picks him up and buries his nose in his son’s hair, feeling choked. Penna says he’s just making sounds, that it’s too early for him to attach meaning to them or be aware of what he’s calling Jaime, but he doesn’t quite believe her. Aren knows who he is - will know who he is for his whole life. Every time he says it Jaime has to swallow down his panic, still not sure that the thing he’s wanted most won’t be immediately torn from him every time he gets it. 

“Da!” he shouts again, over Jaime’s shoulder, and he turns to see Brienne, who was on her way to help rebuild the stables but has stopped to watch them. 

“Not quite,” Jaime instructs. “That’s Brienne.” 

“Ba!” Aren agrees, happy to be corrected.

“That’s you,” Jaime says to Brienne, helpfully.

She hums, her mouth twitching. “Well, it’s better than ‘wench’,” she says wryly, reaching out to hold Aren’s foot in her hand, a precious thing, his curling toes so small in her wide palm.

“Oh, undoubtedly,” Jaime says. “But don’t go thinking I’ve fully retired that one. However, I think we can do better.”

“Brienne is fine,” she says, leading them down the road towards the stables. Her mouth twitches. “Ser Brienne, if you insist.”

“I do.” He adjusts Aren, who’s getting heavier by the day. “And I know my own list of options has grown even longer, but you can call me-”

“Jaime,” she says, the sound of it in her mouth still as good as it was the first time he’d heard it there.

“I was going to say ‘yours’, actually,” he says.

They don’t stop walking, shoulder to shoulder until they’re in view of what’s left of the barn, half the town out with their hammers in the early evening, life waiting for no one.

She squints down at the sight, not quite meeting his eyes but unable to stop herself from smiling. He looks too, drinking in the sight, already planning. Eager to build. She clears her throat. “I suppose it means the same thing already, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” he says.

It means many things: everything he’s done, every choice he owns and everyone he’s failed and everything he’s holding in his arms, warm and real and true. The debts he hasn’t paid yet, the gifts that don’t incur them. The sweetness of a life you share. All the things he has to atone for, the things he can’t forget, the things he has to live for, the things he has yet to choose but feels certain he can. 

The things that are enough. The oaths they’ll keep together.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to daisysusan for the beta and for walking me through it! And to moog for the mental image of Brienne stomping around going “I’m looking for a man with one arm and a small baby. Have you seen him? I have to yell at him.”


End file.
